Welcome to Los Angeles. Prepare to stop.

That is all.

Amusing UK Signage Graphics Part I: Moving About

A couple of years ago, whilst in the UK, I encountered a number of don't-go-here, stop-or-you'll-get-hurt, type of signs that I found particularly charming.  The style of these graphics is amusing to me simply because they just somehow seem so, well, polite compared to their US counterparts.  In other cases, they seem to just have a sense of style that indicates someone, somewhere, put that little extra effort into making them look just so.

I just now realized I have too many of them to blow on one blog post, so this will be the first of 3 in a series.  Here we go!

I love how she holds his hand. 

You may encounter flamboyant personages

as they sashay about the vicinity.

Take your flamboyant personage elsewhere

if you intend to sashay about.

(Notice how the pose of the figure is

identical, save for the arm.)

Noooooooo!!!!!

One could almost read this as "No Stopping!"

Do you notice this sort of thing when you travel, or is it just me?

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power

Los Angeles is a city in a desert.  It's easy to lose sight of that fact.  Given the context, however, it's pretty easy to see that, in such a place, Water and Power are pretty much synonymous.  Years ago I thoroughly enjoyed a book called Rivers in the Desert, which is an historical account of the land-and-water-rights grab perpetrated on the people of the Owens Valley, and subsequent development of the aqueducts by William Mulholland.

I am rather sympathetic to Mulholland, inasmuch as he was a self-trained, uneducated man, who eventually achieved tremendous feats in the area of hydraulic engineering and civic infrastructure.  Of course, the above mentioned land grab was an abhorrent violation of the property rights of the people of the Owens Valley, and I don't mean to diminish that.  But I digress.

Sometime in the '50s and/or '60's the LADWP built a lot of really nice looking modernist facilities all around town.  The iconic DWP Headquarters was built around this time, but there were also a number of substations and the like constructed, that have a coherent visual identity all their own.  Said identity includes smooth concrete walls, thin stacked modern brickwork, and bronze lettering set off of the face of the building on posts.  If you do a google image search under DWP station, or DWP substation, or DWP distributing station, you can see a few examples (although I was disappointed that there weren't more.  I should get out there and take more snaps of these).  Some are more modern, some are more neo-traditional, but almost all of them share the bronze lettering in common.

If you pass by just at the right time of day, you get this:

or this:

or even this:

One of the lovely things about Los Angeles is that, even for all the smog, we do have fabulous light.  *sigh*

Wut

Wut

Sullivan Sketches

Tonight I fly out and leave L.A. behind.  This weekend I'll be in Atlanta for ATLOSCON, where I'll give a talk about the origins of modern architecture.  One of the central figures of my talk, and indeed of modern architecture itself, is Louis Sullivan.  Frank Lloyd Wright is also in my talk as is Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.  I greatly admire all three, but I have a special place in my heart for Sullivan these days.

Why is that?  It seems that Sullivan finally formulated the fundamental theories that Viollet-le-Duc was just beginning to shed light on.  Wright wouldn't have been possible without Sullivan.  Wright applied and perhaps expanded upon Sullivan's ideas, but he didn't particularly revolutionize architectural thinking like Sullivan did.

I'm not sure anyone has since.

So today I bring you a few sketches in Sullivan's own hand.

This Week's Objectivist Round-up

This week's edition of the Objectivist Round-up has been posted over at Try Reason!

Check it out!  John Drake's blog is one of my favorites.  That man has a way with words.

John Herman Dersch

My Grandpa Dersch would have been 101 yesterday.  He died in 2005, just shy of his 95th birthday.

Here he is with his first pickup truck.

It is a 1937 GMC 1/2 ton, with 6 cylinders under the hood.  If this was taken around the time he bought it new, that would make him 27 or 28 in this picture.

He was a farmer in Southern Indiana.  The house behind him was their farmhouse where he and Grandma lived, and where Mom and her brother were born and raised.  He was very innovative in the way chickens were raised for market, and along with his brothers, developed a very good chicken business.  Later, he and Grandma built a big chicken house and went into the egg business.  They also had cattle, pigs, and grew corn on their farm.  He and his brothers were well known and highly regarded in that part of Southern Indiana for their innovations.

He could fix anything that broke and do anything that needed to be done on their farm; that had a big influence on me as a kid growing up.  I think of him often.  He was an amazing man.

Happy Birthday, Grandpa Dersch!  I miss you, but I know you would be proud of me today if you were here.